Lido Finance To Kickstart 4-Week stETH Withdrawal Test On Goerli From Mar. 20

Summary:

• Lido Finance pushed back staked Ether withdrawals on the Ethereum mainnet till mid-May after key audits are completed by late April.
• The platform’s version 2 audits cost $1.2 million so far and uncovered bugs that were swiftly remedied.
• Lido hopes to begin testing stETH withdrawals on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet by Mar. 20, a week later than previously expected.

Decentralized liquid staking provider Lido Finance plans to start testing withdrawals for staked Ether (stETH) on Ethereum’s largest public testnet Goerli by Mar. 20. The timeline for Lido’s tests on Goerli was pushed back by about a week due to audits on the platform’s upgrade codebase.

While the goal was to be ready for the Goerli hardfork this evening, the target date for the Lido upgrade has been pushed back to next week. It is estimated that Node Operators will need 3-4 weeks to fully implement and test validator exits once the upgrade goes live.

Contributors from Lido’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) already started testing stETH withdrawal functionality on the Zhejiang testnet since Friday, the staking provider said in a thread. Zhejiang was one of the first public testnets where developers held dress rehearsals for Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade.

Lido Finance Audits Delay Mainnet Launch

Lido Finance updated its codebase ahead of Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade which users expect will enable stETH withdrawals. The liquid staking provider also launched audits on the updated codebase for its V2 platform. So far, the audits cost $1.2 million and two of the audits have been finalized while the other five are in progress.

The kickback from these audits means that Lido Finance had to push back its tests on Goerli and its eventual launch of Ethereum’s mainnet for stETH withdrawals. Instead of April, Lido hopes to leverage an additional safety margin of two weeks and open withdrawal by mid-May.

Lido commands roughly 30% of Ethereum’s staked ETH market and tops Ethereum’s liquid staking landscape with $9.85 billion in total value locked, per data from DeFi Llama.